Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LATE sixties, a novel based on the Korean wartime experiences of its pseudonymous doctor-author, Richard Hooker, had been kicking around Hollywood for several years. Fourteen directors had been offered the property; all turned it down. Director number 15 was Robert Altman, a television refugee with one major picture (That Cold Day in the Park) to his credit. Altman decided to make the film, hired blacklisted writer Ring Lardner, Jr. to do the screenplay, and produced a brilliant black comedy that was a tremendous critical and popular success. M*A*S*H* took the Grand Prize at the 1970 Cannes...
...made at the height of the Vietnam War, was, although nominally set in Korea, a Vietnam War movie. Prior to M*A*S*H*, Hollywood's only acknowledgment of the war had been the 1968 release The Green Berets. This obscenely chauvinistic, simpleminded film, which starred movie war veteran John Wayne (who also served as co-director), tried to cast Vietnam in the heroic mold of the old World War II movies. It didn't work, of course, because Vietnam simply was not World War II, the Duke's exhortations notwithstanding. Altman recognized this, and M*A*S*H*, with...
Jack Nicholson, like most big stars, can make almost any movie he wants. He can requisition any Hollywood blockbuster that captures his fancy; he can fly off to Europe and make metaphysical thrillers with Antonioni. This time around he has rejected both of these traditional options, choosing instead to direct himself in a comic western romance called Goin' South. It is a peculiar choice. Goin' South is not likely to be a commercial smash, but neither is it artistically ambitious. The film is just a small inconsequential frolic: always eccentric, sometimes wonderful, and never pretentious. It works...
...heyday of Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck, Hollywood beguiled audiences with sentimental tales of working-class women who dreamed of escape to a better life. These days the genre lives on, but in a much revised form. Instead of women, the protagonists of these films are now men, young Italian studs who break out of ethnic urban ghettos to become Somebodies. It's a formula that has already produced a pair of smash movies, Rocky and Saturday Night Fever, as well as new stars to go with them. Bloodbrothers is the latest entry in this sweepstakes...
...Angeles and a weekend house at Zuma Beach that they share with a parrot named Cora and two iguanas (one of which is named Truman Capote because, as Robin explains, "he's cold-blooded"). Robin's sketches, however, occasionally reflect the ironies of Celluloid City. One, called the "Hollywood Mime," for instance, has a character dancing from door to door in Hollywood, banging on each and smiling hopefully until the smile literally falls off his face and has to be pasted back on. Robin Williams should have no such tribulations: his is stuck tight with Krazy Glue...